EXPERIENTIAL COURSE IN COMMUNITY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

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For more than fifty years the idea of community has been at the heart of the PA. From the experiment at Kingsley Hall to its current therapeutic households, the PA’s work has always involved a shared attempt to deal with the hardship of emotional distress through the practice of living together. 

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When the PA was set up, its counter-culture mission was to find an alternative to psychiatric treatment and mental hospitals. All these years later the world has changed beyond recognition. Mental hospitals have mostly been closed down but they haven’t been replaced by a more enlightened and communal approach to suffering, as RD Laing and other PA founders hoped they would be. Instead cost-cutting quick fixes and a punishing work ethic are the order of the day. Community as a therapeutic ideal remains as elusive as ever in today’s fragmented, competitive and increasingly digital world. Yet the need for it is more and more urgent.

But it isn’t as easy as saying that community is good and marginalisation is bad. It is possible to feel at home in prison and in prison at home. Bands of outsiders – a gang or an addicts’ self-help group – may be much more tolerant, cohesive and healing than golf clubs or churches. The shared experience of adversity often creates a powerful solidarity, while shared privilege can be divisive and alienating. Thus thinking about community must also involve thinking about how one group impacts, threatens, ignores, deprives another. Community presupposes conflict.

This course serves as both as a stand alone certificate course and an introduction to the PA (including its houses)

You will encounter various modes of group work to explore group dynamics and what goes on between us.  Seminars will frame topics to discuss but the heart of the course is experiential, comparative learning about group formats and dynamics – and their relationship to the politics of the wider society. 

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Held at the PA premises in Hampstead, north London, the course takes place over six weekends spread out over the academic year. It will be possible to apply to the one year Diploma in Community and Psychotherapy and the  Psychotherapy training from the Experiential Course.

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APPLICATION AND FEES

Application is by interview. Please contact and

The course costs £840 plus a £50 interview fee. There are a limited number of bursaries available for students surviving on low income.

For further Information contact office@philadelphia-association.org.uk

interviews from April 2021